Failing Orbit 5 – Empty Spaces

Wisteria, 2010

Documentary realism, Slavoj Žižek claims, is for those who cannot bear fiction – the excess of fantasy operative in everyday narrative fiction.* What then is this ‘excess of fantasy’ when we look at the empty and fictional spaces of contemporary documentary practice? The familiar spaces of documentary landscape (such as peripheral zones of trade, military training grounds, urban and suburban dwellings, etc.) all raise questions, in equal measure, for both the cultural realities they depict and the unconscious fantasies of the subjective witness. 

Both geography and identity are bound up in reflexive processes of documentary and history. A fragmentary view of the landscape, pitted by trauma and desire, has displaced the traditional sweeping panorama’s rhetoric of discovery, unity and completeness. Contemporary photography now transcribes a more uncertain experience of being in the world; vernacular and banal non-spaces, imagined territories and fictional places, present a topography that is impossible to know. A world of illusion, duplication, control and power, generates an ambiguity in the position of the viewer and a tension between space and subject. 

The use of photography to map spatial co-ordinates, in turn reinvents the world as commodity. Such documents offer fantasies of emptiness, but themselves becoming objects of reduction, reproduction, redistribution and reinvestigation. There is an uncanny emptiness hidden within the reflexive act of transcribing ‘place’ into ‘document’ – there is always something that gets lost in translation. It is perhaps this ‘gap’ that haunts the spaces of the 21st century; an echo of the ghost at the heart of subjectivity that refuses to reconcile itself with its own geography.

* Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View (Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). p. 350.

Failing Orbit 4 – Documentary

Lunch Box, 2011

The obvious effects of the economic climate are now readily visible. However, I have become fascinated by how such effects are transcribed photographically; what does the surface tell us about that which lies beyond it? This has long been a problem for photography; it is adept at capturing everyday detail, but the photographic image presents the surface of the world that, ultimately, keeps complexity at a distance. The large-format camera is complicit in this; its control over the field, focus, perspective, etc; mounted on its tripod, it stands above and apart, from the space it surveys.

Documentary has traditionally presented the symbolic, ravaged fabric of economic crisis; derelict buildings, the homeless figure, etc; the effects that belie the true causes of such victimisation. There is an inability (or unwillingness) of the visual to penetrate the symbolic violence of late capitalism. Rather, it dwells in front of the spectacle, supports and promotes such ideologies; does not every image of the homeless call for that sad figure to be fully reintegrated back into a system that cast him/her as a victim in the first place? 

Walking around this landscape, one finds an irrationality more akin to a dream than a physical reality. Thus, here the stage is set for a disorder of a different register; marginalised spaces that are as much a part of the psychological terrain as the geographical or economic. This work does not present the logic of the traditional photo-story. Rather, a narrative that is fractured and fictional - at once a documentary of an economic landscape, and a meditation on the anxieties over occupation and vision. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Scratching at a Solid Surface 2

Empty Flats, 2010

The photographer, rather than entering a particular space, is faced with a non-porous surface. Just as docile bodies can drift through space, so too the gaze glides across its surface; one regularly traverses it without either pausing or looking. Space and photography perhaps share common properties; indeed, both generate anxiety in order that we might move on more quickly – continuously postponing, yet reproducing the co-ordinates of, desire itself. Of course, many photographs are certainly designed not to be looked-at for prolonged periods (e.g. the billboards that pervade public spaces); rather they drift into the milieu of the mass media. So too public spaces also discourage prolonged contemplation, and even outlaw occupation. Both activities, looking at photographs and occupying space, are now seen as perverse and suspicious activities as soon as they become prolonged.

Here then, is the paradox of the act of photography in this instance (the protracted activities of setting up tripods, operating the large format camera, the use of sheet film over continuous shooting, etc.); one not only looks at the framed space for a perverse amount of time, one also draws attention to oneself – and is seen by others. The photographer occupies a place, but this place never appears in the image (the view is always ‘over there’), rather it is located only within the Other’s field-of-vision; one becomes a spectre – one’s own presence as intruder is made clear when one’s look becomes visible or exposed.

Scratching at a Solid Surface 1

Happy Birthday, 2011

Curiously, photographers always remain alien to the site of the shot. Even if they happen to be familiar with the place… the act of taking the photograph turns them into visitors, or even tourists on their own premises. No matter how close a photograph comes to the space it records, the interaction between the photographer and the space always resembles the act of scratching on a solid surface. 

Jan Verwoert, ‘Research and Display: of Transformations of Documentary Practice in Recent Art.’ in Neuerer, G. (ed). Untitled (Experience of Place). (London: Koenig Books, 2003). p. 18. 

One never quite encounters the world, and photography inevitably establishes a peculiar remoteness from it, only ever documenting or transcribing a certain distance. On the rare occasion one comes in close proximity to a place, the experience is inevitably a traumatic one; exposure, claustrophobic or vertiginous spatial disorders aside, contesting histories repeatedly encircle place and twist it into territory. Locality is always something for others; always negotiated on their terms; it is set out before we arrive and continues after we have left. The photographer particularly, a gangly alien landed from outer-space, is only ever an intruder upon private interactions that take place in public. So place is something that one continually orbits, never belonging at its heart – always a piece of the puzzle, but lost somewhere in space.

Failing Orbit 3 - Economy / Edges

Chicken in a bun £1, 2010

The landscape, pitted as it is by the obvious signs of economic failure, austerity-measures and social-immobility, is a space where the dreams of success now lay tattered across its surface. The desires of excess have now been replaced by anxieties over the excesses of others. Once activated by the shiny new corporate surfaces of redevelopment, such desires have now been displaced to the mundane fringes of our urban centres.

In the late twentieth century, and first decade of the twenty-first, one desired an ideal ‘work-home-leisure-retail’ space, each one compartmentalised, but where the boundaries of each were seamlessly crossed; commuter-belt housing; urban-living in flats above Starbucks; supermarkets modelled on farmer’s markets; etc. The very consumption processes that structured everyday space had turned it into a fiction. City centres became privatised ‘zones’ and were given over to corporate demands; structured to keep the flow of consumption steadily moving, yet modelled to give the appearance of an everyday urban reality. The Simulacrum had indeed displaced the real, and the dream had flipped tragically into nightmare. 

The contours of this fiction have, only now, begun to reveal themselves in the dog-eared, marginalised spaces of the current economic climate. However, the intangible edges of social spaces, that are mapped in these photographs, are precarious places indeed. Peripheral zones are regularly off-limits. Anxiety keeps one moving through space; after all, only the perverse and deranged ‘hang around’ in these in-between spaces. Yet, where else to begin looking for the ruptures in social space? At the fringes one might find a tattered corner to be peeled back, under which might be revealed a zombie-fied version of the everyday; some terrifying Other possibility. Or worse, one may find that nothing at all, in fact, exists beyond the illusions that have been cast. 

Failing Orbit 2 - The Map

The Map, 2011

I find, one day, the marks of others etched into the landscape. Car keys have scratched at the painted surface of a map of the UK hanging outside a garage. Locations have been pin-pointed and routes have been taken. Journeys have been imagined or are yet to be ventured. Directions have been given and advice followed, or not. The lives of others are marked onto the surface, and these marks are impressions of the past. The map itself has become a landscape of intersections and encounters; lives lived. Time has taken its toll on these traces however, eaten away at them, precision-hits have now rusted and blurred. Exact recall is no longer possible, only tall-stories and re-written accounts that correct and distort the mistakes of the past.

Looked at from above, the landscape appears as a blank canvas on which histories are written. Hovering both above and outside, an omniscient vision of a totality, geography is a way of witnessing the lives of others by examining their spatial traces. Movements are tracked, land-use plotted, settlements monitored, society co-ordinated. However, the landscape at ‘ground-level’ becomes a scrutiny of everyday marks that are left as clues to histories that cannot be known. Thus, when one looks at familiar spaces up-close, one finds the traces of others are unfathomable. All the better then, to re-establish that distance, lest one’s own marks become unreadable also.

Messages from the Other side... of the road

Slimming World, 2011

When walking the line that separates the centre from its satellites, one often intercepts messages left by others, and intended for others. Signs of failure, dependency, longing and excess; all make demands on the recipient that cannot be fully met. Sometimes the messages are unclear; the meaning obscured by the gesture itself. Someone here once spoke. Articulating their presence on a different trajectory, by leaving a mark designed to be misread.

Slimming World, Marriage Guidance, Part-Worn Tyres, Happy 30th Birthday, Chicken in a bun £1; all desperate signs of dissatisfaction in the face of desire, yet clues to lives that will never be known, stories that will not be heard. There is a melancholic weight to such signals, they become obstacles to be navigated; best kept on the other side of the road. I take note of these warning signs, written in indecipherable code; their meanings remain uncertain, their directions unclear, their demands unheeded.

Failing Orbit 1 - Neighbourhood

Legends, 2010

On leaving my house I travel in a circular fashion, walking along the peripheral routes that orbit my own neighbourhood. Navigating certain urban, manufacturing, retail and domestic centers, I have been using photography to map the psychological spaces of my immediate locale.

If the traditional notion of ‘neighborhood’ connotes familiarity and belonging, here the neighborhood becomes estranged by the cartographical act of photography itself. The act of photography distances one from the place depicted. The photographer always alien to the location of the photograph; intruder, outsider. The way people behave towards you is testimony to this. Thus, it is not my locale that I photograph, but that of another. It is an alien world I build when I make images, no mere document of a place, but a fantasy of place. A desire to belong to a space that cannot be occupied.

The local is a psychological construct that one never quite ‘fits’ within; there is always gap between familiarity and belonging. Spaces may look the same on a day-to-day basis, they may seem recognizable, usual, unremarkable, but on closer inspection they become uncannily strange - ungraspable and impenetrable. Hence the circular orbit. To maintain a distance. 

Introduction

The Double, 2010

This blog charts the development of my new photographic work. The image above is from the project Scratching at Solid Surfaces (working title), a psycho-geographic documentary of failing and irregular orbits. Navigating the 'Terrain Vague' near my home in Splott, Cardiff, I have been photographing an economic landscape, familiar across Britain today. Spaces caught between prosperity and abject failure, these photographs depict a locale that has been crushed by the global. The spaces of the everyday are now powerful signifiers of an international crisis of epic proportions.

Using a large format camera to document journeys around my neighborhood, I attempt to avoid urban centers, instead circumnavigating peripheries and zones given over to housing estates, retail and leisure parks. The static immobile gaze of the 5x4" camera, not only turns its subjects into monuments, but, as when you stare at anything for too long, the space takes on an uncanny quality of otherness - a space removed from the familiar and everyday. These are documents of an anxious and melancholic time.